This Is Life

by Seth Harwood

  Jack looks away in time to see the passing car: a silver PT Cruiser, moving slowly. Not Gannon, not any Russian thugs, some poor dumb fuck who turned onto the wrong little excuse for a street. Shaw turns the guard’s gun around and hands it to Jack.

  “This a Beretta. Try that for feel.”

  Jack grips the gun and it feels good in his hand, better than a Glock. It’s bigger, and the handle doesn’t cut off partway down his palm. It just feels good. He drops the barrel into the middle of the big guard’s face.

  “You got something else on you, right?” Jack asks. “Tell me you didn’t come all the way to San Francisco with just a couple of clips.”

  Shaw drops the clip out of his own weapon and inserts a fresh one from inside his jacket. “I got a few more clips, and if I need another piece, I’ve got two dead assholes inside who won’t be using theirs.”

  Jack taps the big guard lightly on the nose with the Beretta. “You want to talk with us?”

  “Fuck you,” he says through the blood in his mouth.

  “Nice. That’s real nice.” Jack pushes harder on the guy’s nose, causing him to grit his teeth and make a soft whine in the back of his throat. “How’s that help your participation?”

  At the bottom of the alley, a black sedan’s brakes screech as it makes a hard turn, narrowly avoids hitting either curb, and tears down the block. Jack can see it bearing down, and then Shaw’s on his feet, firing.

  “Jesus,” Jack says. The sedan stops. A Ford. He can’t see through its tinted windows, but he hears a door open on the other side, and then a second.

  Shaw fires twice and jumps forward, hunches against a Mercedes E-Class parked on the curb. Two shots come from the street and disappear into the café. A third breaks the back window of the Mercedes, and Shaw drops down lower as bullets shatter the side windows of the car. Jack slides around so he’s facing the street, his body shielded by the bulk of the Russian. He still holds the gun to the guy’s temple, and the Russian doesn’t move. Shaw rolls, comes out of it shooting from behind the trunk of the Mercedes. Someone in the street yells, and there’s another gunshot. Shaw stays where he is, his head up, both arms across the trunk.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Jack says under his breath. He doesn’t like the situation, the shooting, the holding a gun to a guy’s head. This is all getting out of control. “Do not move,” he tells the guard.

  Then Shaw fires two shots into the street, someone else calls out in Russian, and Jack sees a guy from the sedan, medium height, brown haired with a snap-front cap pulled low, duck around the front of the Ford. The guy has on a tan jacket and brown pants. His cap blocks his peripheral vision, and he’s focused on Shaw’s position as he eases around the front of the car.

  Holding the guard’s head on the ground with one hand, Jack raises the Beretta.

  Still firing at the back end of the Ford, Shaw doesn’t see Cap. He crouches behind the Mercedes to reload. It’s then that Cap comes around to see Shaw and raises his weapon. But he sees Jack too, and Jack’s Beretta. With the gun in his hand and his pick between Shaw and Jack, he freezes for an instant, and Jack fires.

  Jack has no other choice, but before this thought has even cleared his processors, he’s pulled the trigger, knocked the guy back by his left shoulder onto the hood of the car. Then, as the guy starts to raise his gun, Jack follows the first shot with a second to the center of the chest.

  The guy flips back onto the hood and slides down its front, drops into a sitting position on the ground, his legs tangled under him and both hands by his sides. He closes his eyes, swallows hard. When he opens them, he takes a breath and coughs, blood rolling out of his mouth and onto his chin. He’s looking at Jack, and a wave of understanding passes across the guy’s face. It’s the understanding that Jack will be the last person he sees.

  “Fuck,” Jack says and turns away. He puts his head down, trying to erase Cap’s expression from his mind’s eye. Luckily, it works—for now.

  40

  Shaw yells something Jack doesn’t understand. The cop rushes out into the street, firing his weapon and screaming, letting go with a series of shots.

  Jack closes his eyes for a moment. He still sees the guy’s face on the back of his eyelids, that look in his eyes. “Fuck,” he says.

  That’s when the big guard lands on top of him, going for Jack’s gun. He’s got Jack’s hand in his and is trying to pry Jack’s finger out of the trigger guard. They wrestle over the gun, and it comes down below their shoulders, gets caught between them. Jack tries to knee the guy in his side. That’s when the gun goes off. The Russian makes a loud grunt and a huffing comes out of him. Jack sees the top of the guy’s head on his chest and then Shaw above him, rolling the guy off.

  Jack gets up into a crouch. The Russian holds his side, breathing with a soft whistle in the back of his throat. “You fucking bastard,” he whispers.

  Jack looks down at his hands and the gun: There’s blood on both, enough that Jack drops the weapon. “Fuck,” he says. He wipes his hands on his pants, but that doesn’t help, only smears the blood across his legs.

  From above him comes Shaw’s voice: clear and steady. “Pick up the gun, Jack.” The cop has his foot on the guard’s shoulder, aiming his gun at the guy’s face. He looks like nothing’s happened, like he’s only gotten a bit madder.

  “Right,” Jack says. He takes the gun and stands up. In the street, the black Ford has Jack’s friend, Cap, sitting in front of it, and another dead Russian lies splayed out against its trunk. From the silence around them, Jack would guess that another man is dead on the opposite side of the car.

  Cap sits wheezing loud enough that Jack can hear it from where he is. His mouth opens and closes on its own, his eyes empty. The blood continues to dribble down his chin. Then Shaw raises his weapon and puts Cap down with a shot to the forehead that echoes in the narrow alley like none of the other shots Jack’s heard.

  He breathes twice, listening to the shot’s reverberations, looking at what he’s—they’ve—done. Five dead and the big guard wheezing and trying to hold in the blood seeping out of a fresh hole in his side.

  “You want to talk now?” Shaw says to him.

  The guard doesn’t even acknowledge this. His breathing comes in whistles. “Jack,” Shaw says. “Check inside for the girl.”

  Then a few moments later, “Jack. Check inside.”

  The hood of the Ford reflects the yellow light from the single streetlight in the middle of the street. Around Jack’s feet, glass litters the sidewalk, sparkling as if the street were made of gold.

  “You okay, Jack?”

  Jack sits back onto his butt, drops his arms down between his legs. Cap wears nice brown shoes, lace-ups shined to perfection, as clean as the Ford’s hood.

  “Jack. Get the fuck up.” Shaw’s face comes in front of Jack’s, angry now, and the guard’s turned his head toward Jack too. “Fuck, Jack. What’s wrong with you?”

  The lone streetlight glares down. The Ford’s side reflects some of that light in a long, thin line along its length. Jack hears his own breath come in and out slowly.

  “Jack!” Shaw slaps him.

  Mike Haggerty wouldn’t do this, wouldn’t sit down in the middle of a scene, stop to freak out over a thug he’d killed. He wouldn’t even think that guy was a person. “Fuck. Kill or be killed.” That was the line Haggerty had uttered when asked how he could sleep at night. Jack had always thought it was bullshit—until tonight.

  41

  “Jack.”

  Somewhere there’s got to be a cop car on the way, maybe even Agent Gannon rushing to the scene. Haggerty would push through this, stand by Shaw’s side.

  “I’m okay,” Jack says.

  “Then get the fuck up off the ground and go inside the café to find that girl working the register.”

  Jack slowly starts to his feet, climbing to a knee and then rising. The Russian on the ground is breathing with more difficulty now, a vein sticking out on his forehead. Jack
puts his hands on his knees and breathes deeply.

  “Fuck are you waiting for? Time we got on.”

  “Right.” Jack shakes his head, trying to clear the crap out. He points at the Russian with his gun. “Ask him how we get into the Prescott house.”

  “You heard the man,” Shaw says. “Tell us what we need to know.”

  The Russian breathes fast and shallow. His face is red. “We’ll help you,” Jack says. “Tell us what we need and we’ll call an ambulance.”

  “Or don’t tell us and I’ll fucking pop you,” Shaw adds.

  Shaw’s face is hard, uncompromising. He’s sweating, and Jack can see his teeth when he talks.

  The Russian tries to speak. The best he can manage is a whisper, and Shaw crouches down to hear it. “Call an ambulance.” Shaw waves at Jack. He pushes the gun into the guard’s temple. “What else?”

  His lips move, and Shaw starts nodding. “That’s right. You tell us exactly how we get into that house. What’s on the receipt. And what’s waiting for us when we get inside.” Shaw nods as the guy does his best to keep up with the demands. When he’s said enough to make Shaw happy, Shaw pats him on the cheek, tells him help is on the way.

  He stands up. “We get that register to print us out a receipt for a crème brûlée, and we take it over to the house. Then we’ve got to deal with about three heavily armed assholes, and we’re in the house, the home base of all this bullshit.”

  It’s either sit and dwell or go all out is the best Jack can see it. Full forward or head home. And he’s not ready to go home. “Fuck it,” Jack says. “Let’s do this.”

  They head inside the café and find the girl crouched low behind the counter with her hands over her ears, hugging an AK-47 with her elbows and legs. She has her eyes shut but looks up when she hears Shaw say, “Don’t shoot.” He leans down and takes the assault rifle from her, passes it to Jack. “This might come in handy.”

  Jack nods. He crouches in front of the girl. “Ring us up for a crème brûlée, okay? You do that and we’ll make sure your boyfriend gets out of here alright.”

  “He is husband,” she says. And Jack sees the ring on her finger: not meager, but not a gigantic rock.

  “The police are on their way,” Shaw says. “They’ll take care of him when they come. But do us a fucking favor and print a receipt for some crème brûlée so we can get on.”

  He raises his gun, but she waves her hands. “No, no,” she says as he pulls her up to her feet. “It is okay,” she says. She punches some buttons on the register and hits the big blue button that opens the drawer. A bell goes off, the drawer opens, and she pushes it closed. She hands the just-printed receipt to Shaw. “Here. You have crème brûlée.”

  Then she sinks back down, returning to her crouch below the counter.

  Shaw takes the paper and turns back to the dining area. The two men in there aren’t going anywhere. One’s covering a table where he fell, and the other’s a bloody mess at the window. Blood drips down the wall where his face meets the glass.

  Jack steps toward the door with the AK as Shaw checks the old men, takes the guns out of their hands, and shakes the extra bullets out of their pockets. Both guns are snub-nosed revolvers.

  “Any gun in a shit storm, right?” Shaw says, pocketing one.

  Jack nods. He thinks of Mike Haggerty, tries to channel more of the character’s bravado and drive. “You ready to do this?”

  “Shit.” Shaw looks over his shoulder at Jack as he digs into the bloody man’s pockets. “We come this far; I’m not turning back.”

  “You’re out of your jurisdiction, officer.”

  “Yeah,” Shaw says. “And you don’t have one. Makes us even, at best.” He brings a couple of speedloaders out of the guy’s pocket and bounces them in his palm. “Hopkins was a good cop. This was his jurisdiction. We’re cleaning up this mess for him.”

  And Freeman’s jurisdiction, Jack wants to say. Part of him misses the big guy. But he’s also starting to become fully invested; this is his fight, his beat.

  Shaw steps out of the café through what’s left of the front door, and Jack follows. He can hear the sirens now, the police cars coming—not close, but definitely not far.

  42

  Shaw steps to the driver’s-side door of the Ford, gets in, guns the engine. “Let’s go, Jack. Get your ass in.”

  The police sirens get louder.

  Jack hurries out into the street, past the guard whose ambulance they still haven’t called, and lifts Cap’s feet to drag him out of the way of the Ford.

  “Jack!”

  But Jack shakes Shaw off, drags the dead gunman out of the street up onto the curb so they won’t have to drive over the body. When that’s done, he crosses the alley and comes around to the passenger side of the Ford, where he finds a dark red puddle of blood on the ground but no body. Shaw revs the engine, and Jack gets in, putting the AK between his legs. He pulls the door closed just as Shaw starts to peel out toward the top of the street and Vallejo.

  As Shaw makes a hard turn out of the alley, Jack looks at his watch. He doesn’t know how much time has passed since Shaw fired his first shot, but he’s surprised the police didn’t arrive sooner. He asks Shaw for his professional opinion.

  “Clarence probably made this a no-fly zone. Wants to let our man Alexi clean up his own shit.”

  “You think he’d—”

  “Shit. Never know what those two had worked out. Alexi’s been getting protection. Either that or the FBI spooked the SFPD out of North Beach. Fucking Feds can take over a whole area when they building a case.”

  Jack realizes most people would pay to have the police show up faster when there’s a problem. But not sex-trade Russians. Not when they can bring their own heat.

  “Prescott,” Shaw says.

  “A block up and then your first right.”

  Shaw nods, heads up Vallejo, and then turns onto Akakievich’s own private dead end.

  “You ever shoot anything like that AK?” Shaw asks.

  “Once in target practice and twice with blanks in a movie.”

  “Well, if you have to shoot it now, these ain’t blanks. At least make it look good.”

  “I can use it,” Jack says. “It’ll look good.”

  ***

  Shaw drives halfway down Prescott Court and stops in front of number 32. He leaves the car running and gets out. Jack watches him walk to the sidewalk and start toward the door, no hesitation, no plan.

  The street’s quiet: no guards that Jack can see and no pedestrians. In most ways it’s a perfect location for a prostitution ring: close enough to the strip clubs to be accessible, but not obvious; sheltered enough to be protected, known enough that no one will fuck with you.

  Jack gets out on his side of the car. Leaving a car running on the street isn’t something he’s used to. On the other hand, this car’s about as much theirs as the street itself, and probably safer from theft than they’ll be from whoever’s waiting in that house.

  Shaw signals for Jack to hang back. Then, as though they were going through the jungles of Vietnam, he points at his eyes with two fingers, then points at Jack’s: Watch me. Definitely some leftover military shit. When Shaw turns back to the house, Jack rests the AK on the Ford’s roof, aiming it at the door. Carrying the AK here in the middle of San Francisco feels crazy, like swinging a baseball bat in a supermarket.

  Shaw knocks. Jack holds his breath and sights down the barrel of the weapon toward the door. He waits for it to open, ready to take a shot if anything should go wrong. After a little while, he’s forced to breathe. He tries to keep it shallow, wanting to hold the gun steady. Then a small slot opens in the door, and Shaw slips the receipt from the café through to whoever’s inside.

  “Yeah,” Jack says, keeping the AK trained on where the door might open. “You go in and we take it, right, buddy?”

  Shaw looks around, glances toward Jack, and then, at the sound of a lock sliding open, turns back to the door.
r />   The entranceway to the house becomes visible: There’s no one inside, only a vestibule. This is the point at which Jack would like to see Shaw talk his way in, scope out the layout, and then report back—the point at which he’d like them to talk it over and make a plan. But that idea vanishes as Shaw reaches toward the back of his pants and his gun.

  “Shit,” Jack says. He squints harder and aims the AK, but at what? There’s nobody there. For a moment, nothing happens. Shaw checks that his gun is there and then moves forward into the doorway, as if he’s a big-money John looking to have a good night. As Shaw goes in, the door starts to close.

  “Fuck.” Jack takes the AK off the roof.

  Shaw knocks his shoulder into the door and pushes it back hard, then grabs it, pulls it toward him, and slams it back into the vestibule wall again. He follows it the second time, drawing his gun and heading into the space created by the door’s swing.

  In the second this takes, Jack’s around the car and running for the stairs, the AK in one hand, his other hand reaching for the Beretta. He hears Shaw fire, sees a flash, and hears somebody yell. That’s all Jack hears other than his own feet pounding on the asphalt and the rush of his own breathing.

  Ahead of him, the door starts to close, then Shaw stops it. Jack rushes up the steps behind Shaw, pointing the AK and the Beretta around the corner. He’s got too much weapon for his hands to handle, but multiple guns make him feel slightly safer. “The fuck are you doing, Jack?”

  Shaw lets the door come toward him a little and then slams it all the way open again. This time Jack hears a yell from behind it, a muffled scream like there’s someone there, someone Shaw slams into the wall for a third time. Directly in front of Jack, a dead guy sits in a chair, a dark red spot on his forehead and a long black submachine gun across his lap. The blood’s starting to flow down his face.

  Shaw grabs the Beretta out of Jack’s hand, and now he’s holding two weapons on the wall behind the door as he kicks it closed. The door swings out to reveal a guard in jeans and a gray sweatshirt holding his nose with one hand. When he sees Shaw’s double-fisted gun salutation, he drops his weapon—a short automatic smaller than an Uzi—and raises the other hand.